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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
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12:47 pm - "Back" by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
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They ask me where I’ve been,
And what I’ve done and seen.
But what can I reply
Who know it wasn’t I,
But someone, just like me,
Who went across the sea
And with my head and hands
Slew men in foreign lands …
Though I must bear the blame
Because he bore my name.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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2:10 pm - Nigella's Slutty Moroccan Lamb Stew
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 I adapted Nigella Lawson's recipe:
http://www.nigella.com/recipe/recipe_detail.aspx?rid=249
and made lamb shanks with onions, a can of Cento chef cut tomatoes, carrots, and red lentils last night, with a lot of turmeric, cinnamon, fenugreek, cardomom, and the juice of two little clementines. It was excellent, the lamb falls off the bone, and easy to make, just remember not to put the lentils in until 25 minutes until you sit down to eat.. You could do it in a crockpot after you brown the lamb. It's a good way to add a healthier less expensive cut of red meat to your diet, and the stew has a lot of Vitamin A.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, November 8th, 2009
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5:22 pm - Gourmet Group Mangiafesto
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 I started a monthly gourmet group with my Houston area friends on Facebook.
Eat adventurously
Try new things, new countries, new cultures.
Dine at a dinner hour, lunch at leisure.
Share your dish with others.
Savor, don't bolt.
A bite of this won't kill you, try it.
According to St. Anthony Bourdain, Tuesday through Thursday are the best nights to dine - best for chefs and fresh food (especially fish) and Sundays are the best day to lunch.
Fridays and Saturdays are for dates, romance, and weekends in the countryside.
Wine is a food.
Strive to eat sustainably and seasonally.
Be open about your "finds" - a successful restaurant helps families sustain themselves and prosper, and encourages other restaurants to get better and provide good value.
Eat together like a family and split checks evenly, because separate checks or nickle and diming at the end of a meal is a crashing boor. If you don't drink alcohol or eat a particular animal protein, then order an extra vegetable dish or another dessert to try.
Thou Shalt NOT Flake. If you can't keep your dinner commitment you short everyone else of a round of dishes to sample. The very least you can do is send a replacement or perhaps a call to the restaurant to put a sample of dishes on your tab for the others to try. (I'm not kidding about this.)
Thou Shalt NOT Be Late. On time means 5 minutes early actually. If you're over 15 minutes late you owe everybody a bottle of wine or a couple of appetizers or desserts. (I'm really not kidding about this.)
Thou Shalt NOT talk about work or weather in depth unless you are a Super Spy or Super Vilain, or the weather includes hurricanes or rains of frogs.
Thou Shalt NOT be so high or tipsy that you fail to be charming or attentive. No dozing or fisticuffs at table.
Dinners are scheduled to last 2 hours. Sunday lunch 3 hours. No bolting your food and twiddling your thumbs for the check. Gourmets do not rush.
No icky facial expressions - if you do not appreciate Tail of Jabberwocky keep your distaste politely private.
We expect to be seated with 2/3rd of a party has arrived.
We expect to tip 20% for service in restaurants in the USA or other countries where waiters can not rely on being paid a professional salary, unless the waiting is absolutely egregious.
We expect that the chef would enjoy making something especially creative for us all, if we ask politely.
Couples should ideally be separated at table to provide more interesting conversational gambits, perhaps a bit of intrigue, smouldering looks, and harmless flirtations.
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, November 7th, 2009
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5:46 pm - Why I'm Mostly Vegetarian
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| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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11:25 am - Creeped Out
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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2:25 pm - Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything..
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 but I saw this on the Joe.My.God. blog today, a very sobering article from New York magazine about exacerbated aging disorders for people with HIV.
http://nymag.com/health/features/61740/
As far as news go, it's not easy to read. It makes me worry for my friends, and I hesitate to tell them about the article because it is pretty tough to read, but every day that they can guard their health better is a day saved, so I'm going to tell them all the same.
I was shocked to read that bone density is so adversely affected in men with HIV, and insulin resistance. And that the recent trend of delaying treatment after seroconversion until a target T-cell limit is reached, has had severely adverse effects over time.
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, October 30th, 2009
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3:34 pm - Scumbag.....
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 ...used....is what I found tied to the support strut for my truck's door mirror when I left the grocery store. Mildly annoyed, I drove the short distance home wondering who and why and how. As I cut it off with a box cutter, and swabbed down the surfaces with hand sanitizer, I realized that this one incident - more than the sum of all the chickenshit perpetrations ever to happen in my life - more than the total amount of pure evil maliciousness invoked upon any human being by another - yea, even more than the horrid long history of mass murder and genocide among our species - none of these had ever so fully, and completely, and finally eradicated and burned out the last tiny feeble hope of redemption that I had for humanity.
Plenty of other species are violent, prone to rages and killing for pleasure and not sustenance. But only human beings have attained the ability to be utter chickenshits - to hone the talent for pointless and feeble spite to such a fine degree. Other animals can be quite visually and sonically creative, people are not unique in creating art, and recent studies have shown that even language might possibly not be a unique purview of our species either. Our one solitary quality that bears no comparison in the animal world is our capacity to be petty - to engage in making our own characters and motives so infinitesimally small - that the tiniest spinning charmed string of quantum energy has more purpose and right to exist.
Please do not think that an offense to my enormous ego or my accumulated hubris has been enough to rob me of my faith for humanity. Nay, the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune are not what troubles me. There have been 17 arsons within 6 blocks of my house over the last few months, with no hope from the police or fire department at catching the perpetrator(s). Neither those events, nor the recent cruel and much too early illnesses and deaths of friends due to an incompetent American healthcare system have destroyed my confidence in the improvability of mankind. Nope, what has done that is the random, quck, indifferent, and petty action of a typical person.
If an asteroid is ever scheduled to collide with Earth, I will aid you my friend to trek to the waiting space ark. I shall provide you roasted almonds and perhaps some guava paste or other healthily caloric provision, and along with a warm hat and a fresh final cigar in a tube, you may also have a flask of excellent whiskey. But don't ask me to drive you there. Not even your darling children or grandkids. Because I have no hope for the human species any more. I believe that the experiment has run it's course and the data are conclusive, people are basically less noble than our companion animals and livestock.
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, October 26th, 2009
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8:37 pm - Bob Maddox
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I learned tonight that Bob Maddox has died. That's him on the far left in a picture taken 10 years ago. My best bud Bubbles, third from the left in the glasses, told me. Bob was the proprietor of Male Hide Leathers in Chicago for many years, until he retired to live closer to his family in Ohio. He had provided to be buried next to his great love Frank in Kentucky, but there will be a memorial service in Chicago.
I really liked Bob, he was jovial, and friendly, and nasty in the best way. He was a real man's man, but was so much fun to hang out with. He'd get tickled and laugh so hard, that you could see the mischievous liitle boy in him. I met him back in 1990 when he came down to Houston to visit Bubbles. I last saw him back in 2001, when a bunch of my friends flew up to Chicago for a Sludgemaster Mud Party at the Cellblock. Since then I'd sent him Christmas cards, but I didn't get one back last year. He was a real mensch that Bob.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, October 23rd, 2009
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11:54 am - Off with her Head. Or her Speakership at least.
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Today I read that Nancy Pelosi is poor mouthing the chances to pass a robust public option in the Healthcare negotiations, which is a defeatist posture, when the woman ought to be steadfast and inexorable.
I admire Pelosi''s stands on political issues but she can't deliver when it counts, this Healthcare issue needs a leader that can wheel and deal and drag by the short hairs and bust some heads, and Pelosi can't do that. When she was so ineffectual at halting funding of Bush's Iraq debacle back in 2006, Democrats should have understood that a Speaker without any teeth in her mouth isn't much of a guard dog for the country.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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2:49 pm - Boudin Kolaches
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| Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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3:38 pm - Shit from Shinola
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| Thursday, October 15th, 2009
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1:12 pm - My friend's coming home from Boston for 4 days of Mexican food and parties...
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| Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
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3:30 pm - Holy Mackerel Batman!
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 If you eat sushi, or just like regular seafood, then have a look at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Sustainability Website. There's a lot of good information there about what sorts of seafood are plentiful and healthy to harvest and eat, and what sorts of fish and shellfish that should be avoided.
Generally smaller fish are better, and it's a good thing I like mackerel, although it's a real disappointment to see that Unagi (freshwater eel) are on the avoid list. I'm going to take the list to my favorite sushi place Osaka and ask them where their fish come from. The fishmonger I use labels all of their catch, but I was surprised to see that squid was on the Good list, and not the Best choice list.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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5:05 pm - The Least of the Least Among Us
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I'm watching the last golden hours of the National Equality March, and as the progression of speakers rolls on, the constituencies of each speaker falls away in numbers as the crowds diminish, showing that the least among us suffer the most discrimination. These are the people who can't pass, who didn't grow up in suburbs with good schools, who didn't have supportive families or scholarships to college, who never even had the illusion of equality attend them for a year or a day. These people are the strong ones among us, the ones that don't tire, the stubborn, the focused - the greatest.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, October 9th, 2009
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2:30 pm - Obama - Nobel Peace Prize 2009
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First off - Norwegians is the craziest peoples. Ask any Scandinavian and they'll tell you, they are likes so outs of their minds - all the berserker Wikings comes froms tzere.
Secondly - if it pisses off Republicans I'm all for it. I hope they bust a collective blood vessel.
Thirdly - Oh hell, why not? So what if he actually hasn't done much yet but make some good speeches. Just winning the presidency of the USA as a black man itself is pretty effing amazing, and such a game changer, and has given hope to billions of people. Maybe that hope is ill founded, there are two occupations we're involved in, and we've still got military tendrils in half the world's countries, perhaps the idea of an American president getting a Peace prize is oxymoronic. But the Peace Prize itself isn't just an award for previous achievement, it's also a spur towards further political action. It's a game changer itself.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, October 8th, 2009
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12:51 pm - Let your food be medicine and your medicine be food. - Hippocrates
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Saw this in Michael Pollan's article about Food Rules, in the NYT - a paraphrase of the ancient Greek advice:
"It's better to pay the grocer than the doctor" was the saying that my Italian grandmother would frequently use to remind us of the love and attention to detail that went into her cooking. - John Forti
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
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5:09 pm - Alexander McQueen Atlantis Spring 2010 Part 2
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| Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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2:29 pm - Blame it on Rio.
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| Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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1:30 pm - The Future is Now
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After reading litrichoor last week, now I'm reading Ian McDonald's Brasyl
which shifts between 2006 and 1732 and 2032 in Rio de Janeiro, Amazonia, and São Paulo with characters' lives interwoven with quantum mechanics. It's really tasty reading, especially if you jones for Brazilian koolchur.
One theme of the book is how human beings are isolated from each other with different levels of technology and language, not across regions but within one city block, and that this social distance will probably increase as technology advances, to the point where people living in the same city will be mutually unintelligible to each other. Perhaps they'll be able to communicate across the world to a similar strata of people, but not to those who live in close physical proximity.
Of course that's the way it's always been, that's why I'm putting this out on Livejournal instead of talking to the UPS lady about it, or even my local buddies who care not a whit about books. Even Michel de Montaigne was writing "horizontally" not "vertically". That could even be a signifier for whether a book is "good" or not, literature or not, whether it communicates across a stratum or if it zips up and down among people who care not a whit about books, i.e. Harry Potter.
In yesterday's NYT there's an article about gay and bisexual kids coming out young, even before puberty. I didn't read it, didn't think i needed to. And then I saw that the article got flagged on The Daily Beast and read it.
Coming Out in Middle School
I was shocked. By 2009 I thought people would be living on the moon, flying their cars, eating food in pill form, but publicly identifying themselves as gay when they're still children - that's science fiction man! I mean that's like far out - space aliens and L-5 habitats and terra-forming Mars. It's really amazing that it didn't seem so weird when I first saw the article, because it is weird.
If I could time travel back and tell my 12 year old self that he'd never get to live on the moon, but that he'd be free to love whoever he'd like to, however he'd like to, and wear plenty of boots and leather while doing it, wow, that'd would've been really cool.
Oscar Niemayer's Contemporary Art Museum, Niterói, Brazil
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, September 21st, 2009
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6:44 pm - For Nayland
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
stivalineri's journal
Here's a picture from the Fantasy Ball held two weeks ago.
What can you expect of a state that's still ruled over by Cthulu and the Great Old Ones?
The Houston Press food blog has an article today about 
